Monday, July 30, 2007

Titan Quest: Immortal Throne (7.5 hours) - Made it past the titan at the end of the original game. He's a massive step up from any other monster or boss in the game, and required a change in strategy, albeit to a simple 'ranged attack with poison' that any character could do.Trackmania Nations (6.5h) A few sessions online got me back into the swing of things. Mixed with a national Karting championships in Bundy for added incentive.World of Warcraft (6h) - Sandy's catching me again. Need more quality time for getting quests done.Overlord (6h) - Didn't expect it to be directly involved, but more indirectly like Dungeon Keeper or Evil Genius. It plays a lot like Fable and has that XBox feel to the graphics and story structure. Your minions are really an extension of yourself to kill / fetch / do things, and it seems almost cumbersome to have to actually hit something yourself. It has an interesting take on advancement too where you can replay any area you have done to get more items / gold, almost as if the game is taunting you; "go right ahead, spend your time doing stupid things while I wait here for you to do something useful like the next mission". Powder (5 h) Gotta stop playing this. Stupid little addictive game. Was supposed to be a simple diversion and it's got nothing on any of the angband variants. Can't get very far into it though, so I think that's what got the hooks into me at the moment. Once I finish the main boss I'm guessing it'll get dumped pretty quick. Bookworm (1h) - Hmm, another bookworm spell coming on. I'm looking at making a website to host "the ultimate bookworm game" where the board is posted up each 50,000 points for people to find the best word.

Monday, July 23, 2007

Finally settled of updating outlook calendar with the actual time spent rather than trying to make an autonomous CPU count (did't work for smaller games like Powder).

I was expecting the count to be down this week due to bible study, youth, Transformers, and other after hours activities. The LAN certainly restored balance.

Titan Quest: Immortal Throne (22 hours) - A Saturday LAN for the youth turned into a big TQITfest, followed up by another impromptu LAN on Sunday with the main protagonists. Even though I made up a new druid, after the end of it the old one was a better build. Instead of going all the way to the end of nature, my main one had only gone 1/2 way to get the nymph before finishing off defense. The total speed from equipment and auras made for high damage and escapism too.

Powder (6 hours) - Still haven't got a character down past level 10 let alone to the end. Seems pretty arbitrary about gear drops and skill gifts as to whether you can get a character to survive. Finally found divination that gives identify spell. Fits Ok with rogues, but they aren't the fastest class around.

Trackmania Nations (3 hours) - Competitive Computer Gaming started up for the 2nd season of TMN at StLuke's. It also saw a look-in at the LAN, but some maps made Sandy motion sick.

Monday, July 16, 2007

Every now & then I catch myself staring at the game icons festooned over my desktop deciding what I'll play next. I play a lot. A real lot. And not just on one game either. I've had spates of 20+ different games in a week before as well as times when I'm only dragged to one for hours on end.

Typically I'll have a games folder on my desktop where every icon goes once a game is installed. All the most common games I'm playing have additional icons beneath the games folder so I can get to them quickly. When a new game is installed I'l usually toss the least played game icon into the games folder so that there's only ever one row of icons to browse.

Recently though I've had an additional row to the right with alpha and beta testing games + demos that are only there for the short term. It has meant though that more than 30 game icons are littered around the place.

On one such icon-staring occasion I decided that it would be interesting to log the different games I play and how much time I spend playing. This post will hopefully be the first of many weekly updates into what games I play.

I started looking for an automatic application tracker that would monitor how much CPU time a process took up, but it seems that I might have to resort to logging with outlook to get a true indication of time. I had also considered a public calendar to update, but this will do for now. See how the motivation levels hold up after a few weeks ...

So here goes, Week 1. Not the most entertaining week to start on, but you gotta start somewhere.

World of Warcraft (16 hours) - WoW has had somewhat of a resurgance recently as Sandy and I have moved into outlands. Spent a fair bit of time tidying up some loose ends such as 300+ in cooking and first aid, as well as getting exalted with Night Elves for epic mount.

Space Rangers 2 (7 hours) - Probably coming to the end of its hardcore playtime for me; there'll be many more seesions in the future though. I picked up Space Rangers after looking around Total Gaming for other games to buy with tokens (I'd bought into the digital purchasing gimmick to pick up Sins of a Solar Empire on preorder / beta and had loved the no-DRM approach). I hadn't heard anything about SR2 before I saw it there, but for a russian based game to clean up major strategy awards I though it'd be worth a shot. I love it. Best turn based strategy out there!

Bookworm Adventures (5 hours) - Not sure exactly how long Sandy and I played Bookworm Adventures, but it was far more than the 1 hour "demo". Gameplay is more like boggle than the original Bookworm, but there's enough strategy to hold over certain tiles to the bosses to make it entertaining in its own right. Makes me want to play Bookworm tho.

Powder (4 hours) - A brief mention of Roguelikes on GameSetWatch had me itching to get back into it again. The man that does the stats for rec.games.roguelike produces a little game called Powder for GBA. Plays simpler than what I'm used to, but it's compelling non the less.

EDIT: Looks like google calendar has a public side of things. Might try that out for the logging.